It’s Time to Banish (99%) of Micro-sites

It’s time to banish 99% of micro-sites. They waste money, Google juice, and sales. Then there’s the 1% that work.

Definition: Micro-sites typically contain one to five pages of content and are promoted, independently of a company’s homepage, through traditional media and search engines.
They often run without so much as a link from a corporate homepage that gets millions of unique visitors, and that has high search ranking – not to mention a loyal customer base.
Instead of integrating all of their marketing efforts, many huge corporations spend millions of dollars to drive traffic to micro-sites. Then, after the promotion is over, the micro-site is often taken down. Oy vey!
That’s also bad from an SEO viewpoint because you don’t get the benefit of positive metrics and influence of an established site.Integration is the name of the game
If you’re going to spend the time money and effort to create a special promotion, community, game, contest, etc, it makes sense – from an economic, marketing, and influence point of view – to send visitors to it from your homepage. The homepage should serve as your company’s dashboard.If you’re promoting something people would actually want to know about — and if your company is already involved in social media – and has built a true community, you can employ it to drive traffic to the special promotion.
If you’re not obnoxious about it, you can Include your promotion in your Twitter stream, and your Facebook page, your Flickr page, your YouTube page, etc.
Pepsi is getting set to do just that in 2010 with its Refresh Everything site. Looks like it’ll be a terrific, integrated, multi-media initiative for the brand. Link from the corporate site? Nah!

Take a look at the new Pepsi.com brand homepage, which serves as a dashboard for the brand’s scores of micro-sites and communities. Link from the corporate homepage? Nah!

Silos, status quo, fear
Why do so many companies build so many micro-sites?

A lot of companies – Pepsi, for example, have an old-school corporate homepage that’s basic brochureware for investors. Legal, HR, and, I’m guessing, the board, would not be comfortable with the snazzy new brand image.

Often it’s because there is no cooperation between marketing and IT;

When the micro-sites promote social media initiatives, the lack of links from the homepage is often the result of corporate fear and indecision. “What if we get negative comments? What if people won’t like the idea? etc”

Management often doesn’t give marketing a seat at the strategy table, so marketing is pretty much forced to develop micro-sites. If you know you have a marketing budget for the year, the reasoning goes, why fight for integration. That battle could take years to win. Just build a micro-site.

Micro-sites are easier to get approved because management often perceives that they present less threat to the corporate profits, and are less likely to raise the ire of legal if they’re out in the ether instead of staring out from the homepage.

Agencies, in their quest for more billing, suggest micro-sites. Hey, it keeps their staffs employed.

When micro-sites make sense
Of course there are exceptions, and some times when a micro-site makes sense:

When you are launching a brand you are that will be spun off at a later date

When an available URL is a great descriptive, containing the exact keywords you know people will put in search engines.

SEO Goddess Jill Whalen explains it in a nutshell: “Creating micro-sites is a very old SEO tactic that was never very effective, and it’s not something that the search engines generally appreciate….One great site is 1,000 times better than 50 small sites.”Bonus Link: Rich Nadworny, Connect Everything

Comments

HI, B.L. You make a compelling anti miicro-site argument but I think whether micro-sites make sense depends on how easily accessible the main corporate website is for the target audience.
Several corporate websites feel dense and are hard to drilldown. Home pages are covered with links. Some don’t even have easy to find search boxes. Even if there’s a promotion link on the homepage, it can get easily lost among the clutter.
I know all this because earlier this month I searched all Fortune 500 websites for “official” twitter accounts (even promotion-specific) to create a specialized Twitter List.
Perhaps while corporations reconsider website design, links for specialized programs might be redirected from a main website home page link to a micro-site, while simultaneously publishing that micro-site address on PR materials.
You’re still giving up the SEO impact near term but you pick up some of the other benefits you mention. And an increasingly number of people begin to think of the home page as the real hub of all company activity, even if it’s a special promotion.
— Robin

It’s quite amazing that this kind of thing still goes on. But then again I was given an overview of my own company’s history with websites and lo and behold, there were a ton of domains for different products.
Thankfully that is slowly changing, but the damage is done. The content has been too thinly spread and is now hesitantly being brought together.
Are companies really that worried about the “threats” of the Internet?

Hi B.L.
Totally agree with this post. Microsites are normally created as the support to a new marketing campaign with the brand’s new strapline. However, the equity is surely in the brand website itself?
I always suggest using main websites and try to totally avoid vanity URL’s (as a rule). It is so much easier for the ‘lazy’ consumer to remember. As Mr. Krug once said “Don’t make me think’
Having had access to some Hitwise data on traffic to UK websites recently, you can really see the sporadic nature of traffic to microsites and how that effects the main brand website. Brands have a habit of picking consumers up during a campaign and then dumping them at the end, they then have to try twice as hard to get them back for the next campaign. Brands need to flatten out the humps and the more progressive brands are getting this right.
Al

Robin – you are spot on when you say most corporate sites are dense and covered with links, making them inaccessible to the target audience.
I hope companies are re-considering website design. so much of it is simply ineffectual and plug ugly too.
Al – agreed about brands dumping consumers at the end of a campaign. And taking the micro-site off-line after a campaign cancels out the benefit. It’s still a widespread practice.
You’re right that more progressive brands are starting to get it right, but they are few and far between IMO.
BL

Right on B.L. – good to hear more critique of microsites. Yes, a handful of them are helpful, but we’re finding that our clients have had more success when we build out a more useful and immersive Facebook Fan Page that taps directly into to brand’s existing community, rather than try and drive traffic to yet another stand-alone destination.

I think there is a fine line between micro sites and how many a business should have. I think it is appropriate to launch them when it makes business sense but to just launch for the sake of SEO it does nothing but add to the clutter.

Thanks for writing this – I tend to agree with you 100%. Imagine the money agency’s made by creating microsites… More than that, imagine how many clients were lost/relationships damaged due to negative microsite results.
Ryan

I agree and I disagree. We have had great success with driving some really targeted traffic to a microsite that then sends users to the main corporate site through whatever call to action is present.
One quick example: with limited and hyper-focused content, it was a great way to get customers to a site about All Clad cookware who were searching for info. The micro site ranked *much* higher than the main site ever could have because of the huge diversity in content. It was an extremely effective way for us to drive organic traffic to the main site.
I agree with you that it’s silly to spend all kinds of money on a micro site and then just take it down when a promotion ends. But they definitely have their place, although I will admit that they have been overused- but 1% might be a little narrow =)